The black-clothed Claritin Liberator is like a personal bodyguard in a new TV spot by Montreal-based Cossette Communication-Marketing. The second season’s brand awareness ad for Claritin’s Liberator brand – a heavy-duty allergy medication targeting severely congested sufferers – shows the dark ‘Liberator’ hero as a congested woman’s saving grace.
‘Normal antihistamines are for people with allergies,’ says Jo-Ann Munro, creative head at Cossette. ‘Liberator is for people who can’t get on with their day.’
Munro says this thinking led to conveying the brand as an actual movie character in the vein of Terminator – except the Liberator helps people get on with their day by wiping out allergy symptoms instead of nefarious cyborgs.
One of the key goals of the new campaign, says Stephane Langevin, director of marketing for Montreal-based Schering Canada, Claritin’s parent company, is to differentiate Liberator from the core Claritin brand. Part of this strategy includes targeting both consumers and pharmacists, says Langevin. As such, print ads have been placed in magazines such as Pharmacy Post to create awareness.
In the TV ad, which broke at the end of March, Liberator is positioned as the only 24-hour medication for hard-core allergy sufferers. Pre-production polling of 300 consumers in Montreal and Toronto showed a good response to the current ads, says Langevin. He notes further that the Liberator icon will be leveraged in future campaigns, though not necessarily in the same guise. ‘It might not be the same person,’ he says. ‘But everybody can have their own Liberator.’
The spot continues the tradition of desperation conveyed in an older commercial, entitled ‘Drill,’ where a man revs up a power drill, and appears ready to put it up his nose because allergies have made his life unbearable. – by Kristen Vinakmens
Agency: Cossette Communication-Marketing
Client: Schering Canada
Creative Director: Jo-Ann Munro
Art Directors: Jo-Ann Munro, Mahshad Aryfar
Copywriters: Brian Gill, Christina Brown
Copywriter, French version: Sebastien Maheux
